Bookworm, no. 103
Amanda Perry reviews Sivan Slapak’s “Here Is Still Here.” Adrian Ma on Douglas Hamilton’s “Who Shot Estevan Light?” A page from Elise Levine’s “Big of You.” Inside the July/August issue.
Time Lapse
Here Is Still Here
Sivan Slapak
Linda Leith Publishing
240 pages, softcover and ebook
In the current political context, fiction about daily life in Jerusalem is both jarring and illuminating. Sivan Slapak wrote her debut story collection before the Hamas terrorist attack in October 2023 and the Israeli army’s ongoing devastation of Gaza. Nonetheless, the opening story, “Exposing Our Skins,” speaks of a society shaped by violence and split by fear. Isabel, the book’s protagonist, registers the suspicion between herself and a Palestinian taxi driver during “the latest surge.” While she mourns an Israeli friend killed in a university bombing, she also worries about a Palestinian acquaintance whose “skin was always exposed. I understood this, but saw it most clearly when I felt vulnerable too.”
Such basic humanism offers few solutions for these tragic times, and Isabel’s work for a non-governmental organization that promotes coexistence may strike readers as the failed strategy of another era. But Here Is Still Here should not be evaluated primarily for its politics, nuanced as they may be. Rather, Slapak’s greatest accomplishment is her portrait of a woman reckoning with age. The Montreal-born granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Isabel drifts out of religion and into bohemia, complete with flings and a years-long entanglement with a noncommittal musician. When she hits her late thirties, she notices her sister’s dwindling interest in her “escapades,” as she comes to terms with life outside the domestic framework she had expected to inhabit. The result is a compelling, honest meditation on friendship, sex, and belonging—one that, like Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir No One Tells You This, from 2018, reveals a welcome perspective on single women over forty.
A strong sense of voice anchors the collection. When Isabel commits to learning Yiddish, she realizes how much she has already absorbed: “The words rose in me, clinking into a colourful order and lining up as shaky subtitles under the screen of my childhood.” When she dates a Senegalese man, she observes their “chain of eager questions and formulated thoughtful responses about our tribes’ geographies, languages, religions and customs,” only to note that “our curiosity lost steam before we explored the idea of exploring each other.” These and other details make Isabel endearing, funny, and marvellously well realized, as she stitches together a self out of contradiction and contingency.
—Amanda Perry
Wet ’n’ Wild
Who Shot Estevan Light? And Other Tales from the Salish Sea and Beyond
Douglas Hamilton
Caitlin Press
156 pages, softcover
Picture yourself on a remote beach in the Pacific Northwest, sitting by a driftwood fire, listening as an old-timer spins yarns about the rum runners and wild adventurers who once sailed the Salish Sea. That’s the feeling Douglas Hamilton evokes with Who Shot Estevan Light?
A historian and resident of Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Hamilton describes the exploits of Henry Wagner, the pirate and smuggler better known as the Flying Dutchman, who tore across the Georgia Strait in twin-engine motorboats during the early twentieth century. Another gripping account recounts the sinking of the HMS Grappler near the Seymour Narrows, in April 1883. During its ill-fated voyage, the rundown vessel caught fire, and more than 100 passengers and crew members died. Elsewhere, Hamilton explains how the Estevan Point lighthouse, in Hesquiat Peninsula Provincial Park, gained national fame in June 1942. According to the authorities, it was shelled by a Japanese submarine. However, conspiracy theories question whether elaborate psy-ops by the Canadian government were actually at play. Hamilton chronicles the affair with vivid detail and dogged investigation, and he eventually puts forward a convincing case for the official record.
Scholarly but never stuffy, Hamilton’s gathering of regional folklore is as energetic as its tales are eclectic. While they may lack a cohesive narrative, the entries are bound by his reverence for the sea and its mysteries. Who Shot Estevan Light? feels less like a history book and more like a collection of campfire stories.
—Adrian Ma
Book Tasting: Big of You
I bought the billboards. I am the one.
Not Anatu who raised my ancestral palace and lived two hundred years before willing its care to Hurin their elder, and not Hurin’s thieving half-brother Aaron nor his half-brother Saul who together waged war and blight. And not Saul’s beloved consort, Oona of the North, who helped seal the deal on his ill-gotten gains by getting the peoples on her side. Nor the winning couple’s offspring Tippi nor Tippi’s great-great-grandcousin by marriage Theodorus, who sold to upstarts loosely descended from the line who sold to those increasingly not, including Hilde, Erik, Vicky, Al. And Jerry—Jere for short. Who, a decade ago, scaled down and restored my digs continents away in this other desert, a new world. Where in recent times I have asked: what has Jere really done for me?
Yes, it is Jere who supervised the construction and cut the cheques. But trace it all the way back and behold, it is I who paid for the clean restrooms and ace AC system. I who paid for the gift shop with its unisex tees, my picture on every single one. I who purchased the voice-over artist to narrate the video presentation—very educational—and the preggers video artist too, green for five months’ worth of grub in a two-fer I now own.
It is I for whom people stop. For whom they shell out the six bucks’ admission. To gaze upon me.
Does it not follow that I bought Jere? Onboarded to build for me and promote. To bask in my glory, withstanding as it has civilization after civilization and species upon species crumbled to dust.
And for what? For Jere to lean over the cash register yesterday afternoon while thunderclouds boomed across the horizon and threaten me. Make like he will unload me on the eBay.
JERE: Dood, receipts are way down. Getting near time to slash and burn. Break up us bros.
ME (lips sealed in my patented millennia-proof snarl):
Now it is early morning. From my raised dais in the exhibit-slash-throne room, with my superpowers of perception I discern a salute to my beauty in the river of silver sky above my palace, in the uncountable hectares of golden sand scented with sagebrush. A redstart starts up, having journeyed from its riparian home farther west to pay homage—how the little bird sings! The silky jackrabbit slips from its burrow and sniffs the pomaded breeze. And when, in worship of my radiance the refulgent sun acclaims me, I accept while reclining in the GOAT indoor air that is my due.
If Jere thinks he can rip me from this sick life he has another think coming.
Desert dawns. They really get me thinking. This one more than most.
—Elise Levine
Excerpted with permission from Big of You (Biblioasis). Read more about Elise Levine’s collection of short stories in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada.
Inside the July/August Issue
“What was on the author’s mind? A few things, all existential to a degree. He and his wife would soon be empty nesters; the drumbeat of apocalyptic climate change was pounding louder than ever; a job in university communications had become uninspiring; and, damn, overwhelming technological change threatened the work of writers.” Jude Isabella reviews Dan Rubinstein’s Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage.
Kelvin Browne on Sharron J. Simpson’s The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History.
“Assume total blankness.” David Macfarlane asks, What do Americans think of when they think of Canada?
And much more!